How to Define Stages in Journey Maps

April 17, 2019August 12, 2019

Stages are the backbone of any customer journey map. And this is what you start building your journey map from right after creating a customer persona. However, a customer journey is usually more like a flow than a staircase — it may not always be that obvious how to divide it into particular journey map stages.

Let’s take a look at a few ways to define your customer journeys map stages and map them out on your CJM.

Define the scale

First off, define the scope of the journey that you will focus on. You can either zoom out on the overall journey and go with the universal high-level stages for any product or service: awareness, consideration, preference, action, and loyalty. Or you can dig a little deeper and focus on more specific parts of the customer journey. This might be the most problematic area of the service that needs to be improved in the first place or the part you know the most about. For example, if you have a retail store, you can zoom in on the delivery stage, map it out and see how you can fix or to improve it.

Group by touchpoints

Now that you’ve defined the scope of your journey map, it’s time to identify its stages. One way to do it is to take a closer look at the touchpoints that a customer goes through along the way and try to arrange them into groups according to their similarity.

Let’s take a customer journey in a travel agency as an example. Imagine yourself as a client who wants to go places on vacation. Then think of all the possible touchpoints that you are likely to go through when using the services of a travel agency. Having a list of the touchpoints, you can easily come up with the names for the stages of a customer journey.

Search results, Google ads → Research

Agency’s home page, visiting pricing and other pages → Choosing

Phone, email, contact form → First contact

Trip proposals, booklets, and brochures → Selecting a trip

Payment form, contract → Paying for the service

List of necessary docs → Collecting the docs

Agency's support line → Support

Feedback form, email → Feedback

Use customer goals

You can think of a customer journey as a set of subgoals that customers are trying to achieve in order to satisfy their ultimate goal — why they decided to use your product in the first place. You can put yourself into your customers’ shoes and try to point out what those subgoals could be when interacting with your product or service.

For example, once customers have selected a travel agency, their next goal is to choose a suitable trip package, which signifies the beginning of a new stage in a customer journey.

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Use affinity mapping

An affinity map is a tool for organizing complex data into groups and subgroups. It allows structuring a broad range of ideas so that you can analyze them more effectively. Here is how you can use it when drafting the stages of your journey map.

Brainstorm. Think of all the real or hypothetical actions that customers will have to perform on the way to their end goal.

Record. Write down each customer action on a separate sticky note. Randomly spread notes on a large work surface so all notes are visible to everyone.

Analyze. Look for actions that seem to be related in some way and place them side by side.

Categorize. From these relationships, try to define categories and think of a name for each one of them.

Having categorized all the customer actions, you are likely to end up with ready-made stages for your journey map.

To help you out with identifying the stages for your journey maps, we have created a page with CJM templates for a wide variety of businesses, starting from coffee shops and ending with banks and universities. All the templates already have a number of stages that can give you a clue of what you can do in your own journey maps.